Here's everything you need to know about ‪‪Kazuo Ishiguro,‬ who just won the ‪Nobel Prize in Literature

Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson got Oscar nominations for their roles in the film adaptation of Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" Columbia Pictures Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.

The prize committee in Sweden said his works uncovered "the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world."

Ishiguro has written eight novels since he started working as a full-time writer in the early eighties. Several of his novels have been made into movies (including one that was nominated for eight Oscars), and he's written some screenplays himself.

The award was announced on The Nobel Prize Twitter this morning:

"If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka, then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell," Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said on Thursday when awarding Ishiguro. "But you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix. Then you stir, but not too much, then you have his writings."

Here's everything you should know about Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro and his novels:

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Ishiguro, 62, was born in Japan in 1954. He moved to Britain when he was 5 years old.

His most renowned novel, "The Remains of the Day," was made into a film in 1993 starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

Columbia Pictures

The story is told from a first-person point of view. The narrator is Stevens, a butler in Britain, who recalls his life in diary form while the action progresses through to the present day. The novel starts in the years leading to World War II, and advances to the 1950s. Most of the novel focuses on Stevens' relationship with a former colleague, the housekeeper Miss Kenton.

The film adaptation received eight Academy Award nominations, including acting nominations for both Hopkins and Thompson, who lost to Tom Hanks ("Philadelphia") and Holly Hunter ("The Piano"), respectively. Hugh Grant and Christopher Reeve also appear in the film, which lost its best-picture nomination to "Schindler's List."

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Ishiguro's 2005 novel, "Never Let Me Go," was made into a film starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield.

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"Never Let Me Go" takes place in late 1990's England. At first, it seems like a simple story of three students at boarding school. But as the novel goes on, it's revealed to the reader and the characters that the lives of ordinary citizens outside the school are prolonged through state-sanctioned human cloning.

The clones, who are the students, grow up in a special school, separate from the outside world. When the students become young adults, they start to donate their vital organs to ordinary citizens. And they continue to donate their organs until they "complete," a better term for death, which usually occurs after donating three or four organs.

The chilling film adaptation, directed by Mark Romanek, came out in 2010. In 2016, a miniseries based on "Never Let Me Go" was released in Japan.

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Ishiguro has also written scripts for film and television.

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Ishiguro wrote the screenplay for the 2005 film "The White Countess," starring the late Natasha Richardson. The film is set in 1930s Shanghai, where a blind American diplomat develops a relationship with a young Russian refugee.

In 2003, he wrote the screenplay for "The Saddest Music in the World." Set in Winnipeg during the Great Depression, a beer baroness organizes a contest with a $25,000 prize to find the saddest song in the world.

A number of Ishiguro's novels are set in the past, and memory is a common theme throughout his work.

"Never Let Me Go," for example, was set in the late 1990s.
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All of his novels except one (2015's "The Buried Giant") are written in first-person narrative, and he's not afraid to show and emphasize his character's flaws. His novels also tend to conclude without any sense of resolution, often leaving his characters' troubles throughout the story buried in the past.

In a statement after Ishiguro's Nobel Prize announcement, the committee wrote:

"Ishiguro's writings are marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place. At the same time, his more recent fiction contains fantastic features."